Leadership of Innovation 6 – Innovation in Every Area
15 Dec 16
Inzpire
In my last blog I looked at the problems that lack of trust and lack of ownership cause for organisations that seek to be innovate. I also observed the importance of viewing innovation as everyone’s responsibility and not just the responsibility of a privileged elite in a research lab. In this blog, I am going to examine what an innovative organisation actually looks like.
Over the 11 years of Inzpire’s lifetime, I have learned that truly innovation organisations are innovative in everything they do, not just in one or two ‘showpiece’ innovative products.
Having a handful of innovative products is fabulous but it is not enough. Genuinely innovative organisations are designed around innovation from the bottom up. In these organisations, the whole organisation embraces innovative in everything it does and throughout the totality of its entire operation.
This means innovation pervades the complete enterprise: the products and services it offers, the reward systems it employs, the operating model it uses, the business plan it follows, the design of the office workspace, the way the leave policy operates, the way expenses are dealt with, the dress code, the staff sickness policy - in short, the way it all works. Innovative organisations are not innovative in one or two areas only; either the organisation is innovative and forward looking in everything it does, or it is not really innovative at all.
At Inzpire, we have come a long way down this path but we have much further still to go. Evidence of our innovative approach can be found in several innovation awards which acknowledge the innovation of our products and services, but which also credit our innovation elsewhere in the organisation – for example, we have instigated a completely uncapped leave scheme, we are abolishing the requirement for formal appraisals and we have invested heavily in a unique approach to HR and excellent, and unusual, benefits for our staff.
Our staff are very important to us because, as in any organisation, our people are both the biggest source of our innovation and the biggest barrier to it. How we treat them determines whether they will be an accelerant to innovation, or a retardant.
We want the former. We want to tap into people’s innate propensity to innovate which, as we have observed in earlier blogs, is very strong. However, innovation involves change and there will always be people, in any organisation, who resist innovative change. It is the job of innovation leaders to finding ways of bring these people with them on the innovation journey. A compelling organisational vision and purpose can help here (see Blogs 1 and 2 in this series).
Internal resistance to innovative change is quite normal, natural and to be expected. Ultimately, we are all creatures of habit – habits formed from our past experience. Each one of us is actually a living history book of everything that has gone before in our lives. We have worn our own grooves and we are almost always happy in those grooves and a little reluctant to climb out of them. It is a fact of life that, when the winds of innovation or change blow, some people tend to build walls and some people tend to build windmills.
Therefore, a big part of an innovation leader’s job is to be a skilled and convincing change agent who is adept at encouraging peoples to venture out of their safe grooves! Sometimes, however, innovation leaders simply need to show the way. A good example is of Henry Ford, inventor of the Model T Car who said:
“If I had asked them what they wanted they would have said a faster horse!”
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